I went out this weekend with the guy who had emailed me through meetup.com. We had emailed back and forth a few times and finally planned to meet for drinks after work at a bar near downtown on Friday.

I first went to an even earlier happy hour with a friend of mine before heading over to meet my date, so I was nice a liquored up for the date… meaning I had one drink and could already feel a slight buzz. I’m a major lightweight!

Anyway, I met up with him and we sat on the patio and chatted for two hours, never dealing with a lull in the conversation. We have a lot in common and we both asked questions back and forth. Because I had to go meet with a friend later that night, I left after 2 hours after agreeing to go to the Denver Botanical Gardens on Sunday.

Things had gone really well and I was looking forward to seeing him again.

Fast-forward to Sunday.

I called him after I was done hanging out with my friends, as I had told him I would do. The Botanical Gardens was closing in 30 minutes, so there was no time to go there– but really, it’s just a bunch of plants… and I’ve been there before and not much changes year to year. I met him at a restaurant close to where I was, but it happened to be closed on Sundays, so we ended up going to a jazz club around the corner.

Let me just throw this out there: jazz club with live music + dinner = a pretty awesome date idea

My date and I continued our ease of conversation, talking about movies we like, things we like to do– you know, the typical first-date questions– when he made a comment that sounded kinda whacky (unfortunately, I can’t remember what the comment was… just know that it was “out there”). Not really thinking about what I was asking, and really only wanting to give him a hard time for saying something so dumb, I said to him “Are you a conspiracy theorist?”

That’s when he responded with “I don’t like that term because it has a lot of negative connotations…” and proceeded to tell me about the different “observations” he’d made about Denver, about Colorado in general, DIA– our airport… He actually spent a good amount of time telling me the “crazy” things people believe about DIA and then explained the “not crazy” things that are suspicious about DIA.

I would like to go on the record to say that I’ve lived in Colorado my entire life, I remember when they built DIA, and I have never looked into the “weird” things that surround DIA. Because really, who cares? If it doesn’t effect me, why do I care if there are buildings buried around DIA?

But now I know– there are buildings buried below the airport, too many tunnels than would be necessary for airport expansion, giant rooms below the airport, demon horses (the horse is a real thing (it’s the stories about it that are whacky)–have you seen the demon horse that greets you when you drive to the airport? Holy crap is that thing freaky! The eyes GLOW!), swastika layouts, phallic symbols (thank you Stephen Colbert!)… the list goes on and on.

I don’t know how he didn’t just get up and leave because my face told him I thought he was an idiot. I have a terrible poker face, and even if I’m telling you one thing, my face will tell you how I really feel/think. So either he’s the least-observant person ever or I managed to not let my true thoughts show through.

We ended up going to get ice cream (hey, a lot can be overlooked if I’m promised ice cream) and walking around continuing our conversation. When I finally dropped him off at his house (he had walked to the restaurant and we had driven to the ice cream place), I realized that I could not care less about seeing him again. Yes, we had a lot in common and he was a really nice guy…

But I just can’t get over the fact that he’s a bit crazy!

Is it weird that I’m glad I went on a date with someone where the story that came out of it was finally a “you will not believe who I went out with this weekend!” kind of story. I’ve had the (un)fortunate fortune to go out with relatively normal, albeit boring, people and the dates are usually “just okay” with nothing interesting to report or tell people about.

So thank you, Conspiracy Theorist, for being my first crazy!

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